Regina Gallery: The Armory Show    Mar 5 - Mar 8, 2009

REGINA Gallery is pleased to announce its first participation at one of the major international fairs of New Art – Armory Show which runs March 5 - 8 in New York. REGINA Gallery will show new works of the artists long collaborating with the gallery – Sergey Bratkov, Stas Volyazlovsky and Semyon Faibisovich, a series of new drawings by Pavel Pepperstein and artworks from a new project of CLAIRE FONTAINE. Artworks presented at REGINA Gallery’s booth reflect both Russian and global realias as well as draw attention to the present-day world values.

SERGEY BRATKOV is one of the most important Russian artists on the contemporary art scene. Socially critical, politically motivated and yet with a lyrical edge, his photographs are a direct and at times unsparing portrayal of everyday life since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The bulk of Sergey Bratkov’s work was created during those years of unbridled confusion at the loss of a previously stable world order, and the promise of a better, freer, more individualized future…” (Thomas Seelig, curator of the collection at Fotomuseum Winterthur) Sergey Bratkov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine (1960), lives in Moscow. Last year his large retrospective exhibition “Glory Days” was displayed at Winterthur Photography Museum. The show will be traveling to Madrid, Hamburg and Kiev, where an expanded version will be shown at Pinchuk ArtCenter.

CLAIRE FONTAINE is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

SEMYON FAIBISOVICH – architect by training, he “built” canvasses-monuments to the outgoing world of the Soviet past. Faibisovich did the incredible – “he made Soviet life the subject of aesthetic admiration”. After a 20-year break the artist returned to painting and creates new works which give the feeling of changes which took place in the last few years. “I think he has come upon something now…” – writes E. Degot in her introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue “Comeback”. S. Faibisovich was born in Moscow (1949). Lives and works in Moscow.

PAVEL PEPPERSTEIN is an artist, writer and theoretician. After his successful projects “City of Russia” and “EITHER-OR. National Suprematism – a project of a new representative style for Russia”, dedicated to the creation of a new architectural and artistic style for Russia, the artist was invited to take part in the forthcoming Venice and III Moscow Biennale. Born in Moscow, 1966. In 1987 he graduated from the Prague Academy of Arts and founded the Medical Hermeneutics group. His works are long world-renowned and are presented in major international collections. The artist’s drawings often come as illustrations to his books.

STAS VOLYAZLOVSKY is a graphic artist, an author of video, photographs and objects. His artworks are essentially psychedelic trash legends based on the most urgent topics of today. Graphic works, performed on textile, and “wall newspapers”, are determined by the artist himself as “Chanson Art”. Volyazlovsky’s canvases are bed-sheets, pillow-cases and towels dipped into “chifir”, an extremely strong tea which is very popular among inmates of prisons. They are littered with texts, graphics and ornaments performed in violet ballpoint pen. His main characters are Pushkin, Hitler, Putin, Saakashvily, Yushchenko, Timoshenko, and fauns, “lolitas”, mutant nurses, Dracula, children outlaws. He was born in 1971, graduated from an art school and the courses of interior decorators. Took part in the work of the R. E. P. and the Totem club art associations. Lives and works in Kherson (Ukraine).